from touchdrawing
The other night in Rob’s meditation class, he said or did something that prompted me to think of Will Lansa, his Native American character. Will has now been featured in four books – Prophecy Rock, which won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for best YA novel in 1996; Hawk Moon, nominated for the award the next year; and now Double Heart and Time Catcher. And that’s when it struck me that the characters created by a pair of married fiction writers aren’t just confined to the pages of books.
Writers spend thousands of hours creating characters, plots, and stories for their novels. If you’re a Dan Brown writing in The DaVinci Code or The Lost Symbol, or Jeff Lindsay writing about blood splatter expert and serial killer Dexter, then you’re spending hundreds of hours doing research before you even begin your novel. Once you’ve got your characters, you need to come up with story that’s in alignment with the characters you’ve developed.
So with two married fiction writers, your breakfast conversation goes something like this:
“I’m making headway on what happens to the tulpas in part two,” Rob says.
“I think Dominica is going to be disappeared to the dawn of time. But what are the tulpas doing right now?”
“The same thing your brujos are doing, creating havoc.”
Any outsider who overhears this conversation probably relegates us to some psyche ward. Fortunately, it’s our daughter who overhears this as she walks into the kitchen. She looks at us, long, deliberate looks, rolls her eyes, grabs her coffee yogurt, and sits down with the newspaper’s daily puzzle. She then ignores everything she has just overhead.
She already knows that she shares this house with Will Lansa, Nick from Crystal Skull, Mira Morales from Tango Key, Tess Livingston and the ghosts of Esperanza, Indiana Jones, and all the human and animals characters we’ve created. She has her own characters struggling to be born; our guys are probably an irritant for her.
During that meditation when I recognized Will Lansa in Rob, I thought, Oh wow, he needs to meet Mira, the psychic bookstore owner from my Tango Key series. Or: Tess from Esperanza should travel to the Hopi rez to meet meet Will. Uh-huh, sure. Given the state of publishing these days, that’s not going to happen. And yet, the characters who dominate our creative lives also lurk in the corridors of our real lives. They are the heroes, the antagonists, the archetypes that define us as human beings. Even if you don’t write fiction, these characters are alive, somewhere, within you.
As human beings, we live in a collective soup. We’re connected in ways we don’t yet understand. Perhaps fiction is one venue through which we explore those connections. So when Tess Livingston sits down for coffee with Will Lansa, what do they talk about?
Well, ask Megan.
But she’ll probably ask you not to interrupt her as she works out the daily Suduko.
We recently started a blog on our fiction writing. It is a huge part of our married lives, with more than 50 novels between us, and all these odd fictional characters running around in our psyches. On the blog, we talk about anything related to writing, publishing, stories, characters… and the changing face of the publishing industry. Rob’s post today talks about the lost Indiana Jones novel.
I can’t think of more interesting breakfast companions! How very cool to have those sorts of conversations with each other.
We live in a house filled with a dozen other people!
You know, it’s been pretty well established by researchers in the metaphysical fields that everything a person thinks and creates in his or her mind exists in a true reality on some level of the astral planes. We tend to think of the planes as being “stacked”, but apparently they are instead interwoven, aligned, parallel, etc. So Mira and Will certainly exisat within their realities as true entities. For me thss is provocative, espcially because it’s a reminder to each of us to be careful what we think, because that old truth, “THOUGHTS ARE THINGS” seems to be completely true! Not only Porky Pig and Donald Duck, but also Hannibal Lector and those characters of his black ilk reside in the astral world! Those researchers seem to have established some well-founded hypotheses that when we experience nightmares, we are visiting those lower astral planes where the darkside has its reality. Sort of like a genuine Alice down the rabbit hole. I have no problem accepting this, and find it fascinating. Would love to run into Will and Mira!! Love love love the books, Guys!
Lol! I would love to be a fly on the wall! Congrats on the new blog.xx
Our brekkie conversations are about who went to the toilet during the night, and who needs their sheets changed because they didn’t. 😉
the world of fiction and non-fiction most certainly ‘overlaps’. that which we see in real life ultimately becomes a part of our imagination, and whether it comes out in writing or painting or music, that is where the lines criss-cross. i think it’s marvellous!!! and i’m so super excited about your book, you have absolutely no idea…..
And I so love your poem, shadow!
Sounds like all three of you are working on puzzles to me .-)
Interestingly enough (since I don’t play Sudoku) I looked up Sudoku on Wikipedia and found some intriguing things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku#Rules
* “Sudoku; English pronunciation: /suːˈdoʊkuː/ soo-doh-koo) is a logic-based,combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid (also called “boxes”, “blocks”, “regions”, or “sub-squares”) contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which typically has a unique solution.
Completed puzzles are always a type of Latin square with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. For example, the same single integer may not appear twice in the same 9×9 playing board row or column or in any of the nine 3×3 subregions of the 9×9 playing board.
The puzzle was popularized in 1986 by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, under the name Sudoku, meaning single number ”
*The name Sudoku, means single number (9×9 =81:8+1 = 9)
*Nine is strongly associated with the Chinese dragon, a symbol of magic and power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_%28number%29
There are nine forms of the dragon, it is described in terms of nine attributes, and it has nine children. It has 117 scales – 81 yang (masculine, heavenly) and 36 yin (feminine, earthly). All three numbers are multiples of 9 (9×13=117, 9×9=81, 9×4=36) as well adding up individually to 9 (1+1+7=9, 8+1=9, 3+6=9).
*”Hypersudoku is one of the most popular variants. It is published by newspapers and magazines around the world and is also known as “NRC Sudoku”, “Windoku”, “Hyper-Sudoku” and “4 Square Sudoku”. The layout is identical to a normal Sudoku, but with additional interior areas defined in which the numbers 1 to 9 must appear. The solving algorithm is slightly different from the normal Sudoku puzzles because of the leverage on the overlapping squares. This overlap gives the player more information to logically reduce the possibilities in the remaining squares. The approach to playing is similar to Sudoku but with possibly more emphasis on scanning the squares and overlap rather than columns and rows.
Puzzles constructed from multiple Sudoku grids are common. Five 9×9 grids which overlap at the corner regions in the shape of a quincunx is known in Japan as Gattai 5 (five merged) Sudoku. In The Times, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald this form of puzzle is known as Samurai SuDoku. The Baltimore Sun and the Toronto Star publish a puzzle of this variant (titled High Five) in their Sunday edition. Often, no givens are to be found in overlapping regions. Sequential grids, as opposed to overlapping, are also published, with values in specific locations in grids needing to be transferred to others.”
And by looking at the photo at the top of this post,I found it interesting that there is a game called “Photo Sudoku”. Maybe Megan would find this puzzle interesting as well?
https://www.photosudoku.com/
Mike Clellend with his interest in the number sync 1234,would probably find the section in the Wikipedia article titled “Cage total tables” interesting as well,I would imagine.
Example;
9 cells
45: 123456789
All very interesting,but I still can’t get into Sudoku.
Wow, the history of Suduko! Thanks, daz. I go crosseyed when trying to do suduko!
The line about the Chinese dragon was because next year is the Chinese “Year of the Dragon”,2012.Which also happens to be my Chinese zodiac (if that’s the right word),because I was born in 1964 (Year of the Dragon).
I’m no expert,but if nines are a completion of a cycle,then how uncanny is it that next year is the “Year of the Dragon”?
Since a lot of sources are saying 2012 is the completion of a great cosmic cycle.
Karin does a Sudoku virtually every day – even takes a book of them when we go away on trips!
Like Megan!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_Shu_Square
Good luck with the new blog.
Thanks, Mike!